The following is a series of messages received on my public figure Facebook.

Hello sir, I was recently watching some of your videos on YouTube and I just have a few questions if you had the time. I understand you are probably very busy.

'sup?

Well your one video said that you think "all religious teachings are wrong" but what about Christianity that teaches good morals and to be kind and not kill and steal and stuff like that?

Christianity doesn't teach good morals. It teaches blind obedience and family abandonment in favor of a death cult that depends on gnostic make-believe. The commandments you're talking about aren't Christian. They're from the Jewish tradition and are shared with Muslims too. That's only some of the commandments by the way.

So with all do respect where do you get your morals from?

I get my morals from the same place you do. You just mistakenly think they come from somewhere else. Because we evolved as a societal species, there was a significant selective pressure toward those with compassion for their family friends and fellows. I've heard some really sick Christians tell me that if there was no god, they'd be raping and killing and stealing for the fun of it. As if that could be fun. But we have substantial data now that what really happens whenever Christians lose their faith, they tend to lose their bigotry too. They become more curious, more tolerant, more rational, and tend to vote more liberally. Statistically there is a distinctly negative correlation between religion and morality.

The "source" of morality is not the subject opinion of people pretending to recite the subjective opinions of the tyrannical monster they made up. The source is within yourself. All you need for objective morality is a definition that is independent of this god you imagine. Once you know what morality is apart from that, then you can objectively measure God against your moral standard, wherein God consistently fails. Watch this video, and you'll never make the argument you just did again.

Without a source it is impossible to define morals because John over here could say "This is having morals" but Bill would say "It's not."

Defining morals without a god is easy. it's already been done.

I just want you to know that I am talking to you with respect. But society shows that it has gotten worse in the last 50 years not better.

No, wrong. We've definitely gotten a lot better consistently over the last few centuries, and that trend has been constant through the last few decades.

Someone who truly follows the bible, will show kindness and tolerance because that's what God teaches. I am sorry for the mean, rude, unkind Christians that you have ever met, but that's only because they are not truly following the bible's teachings.

Stephen Pinker also wrote about this in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, where he documents both our continued progress toward compassion and away from violence, and also how religion lies trying to reverse that, the way religion reverses everything.Someone who truly follows the Bible will sell his daughter into slavery for half the price of his son, and will murder anyone working on weekends.Someone who truly follows the Bible will also murder anyone not gullible enough to buy into your religion.Anyone who truly follows the Bible will sacrifice their first born on the alter of God, and will murder any infidel on the word of one or two witnesses.Anyone who truly follows the Bible will also murder rapists as well as their innocent victims and will also murder disobedient children.Anyone who truly uses the Bible as their moral guide would be a criminal in every country on this planet.

But see that's old testament. And God never had anyone sacrifice their first born or sell their daughter or kill the innocent.

Yes he did, as one of your prophets lamented. Jesus said he came to fulfill the law, and that you had better follow every jot and tittle of those old Jewish commandments, or else you would be called least in Heaven.

How many rapes do you think there would be if the rapers knew they would get the death sentence?

How many rape victims would a moral person murder?How many slaves would a moral person keep?Would a moral person only allow slaves of a certain race to go free after seven years, but keep the slaves of every other race forever?

So which is worse telling putting a rapist in prison for five years letting him get real bitter and get out and commit a murder or give a rapist punishment?

Life in prison is a punishment. Death is an escape from punishment for those who believe in life after death. That's why the murder rate is actually higher in every state that has the death penalty.Would a moral person punish anyone for the thought crime of not believing impossible nonsense for no good reason?Do please answer the questions I already asked. How many rape victims would a moral person murder?

They wouldn't, it wasn't their fault they were raped. Sure let the rapist get off with five years, but 9 times out of 10 the victim will contract a disease and be suffering for the rest of their lives and the rapist will do it again and end up in prison to My and time again.

Yet your Bible commands that the victim be killed. Thus your Bible is less moral than you are. How can that be? Now answer the next question. How many slaves would a moral person have?If disease is the issue you say it is, then why does the Bible say that the victim should be forced to marry her rapist?Would any guide to wisdom or morality ever suggest that a rape victim be forced to marry her rapist and never be allowed to divorce him?

The bible says not to kill the victim but to declare them unclean and they just had to follow the steps of getting clean, which is old testament doctrine. The thing with slaves as well is old testament doctrine, your thinking of slavery like we had here in the states. In the bible the way it happened is that one family who couldn't pay a debt would be slaves or what we call servants and would work until the debt was payed.

Depends on the circumstances. If the rape happened in the city, the victim must be murdered. In the commandments that you just referred to, a slaver is permitted to beat his slaves so severely that they can't get up for a day or so. You can even knock your slave's eye out. Only Jewish slaves were allowed to be released after seven years, because the Bible is racist. That's in your commandments too.

I have another project to work on right now, but I think we should continue this conversation. I would like to do that more publicly, for the sake of posterity. These private conversations don't achieve much to my experience.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

I understand the phrase "believe in" to mean "pretend". I trust those who have earned that trust. I accept what I can show to be true, and I have confidence in those things that past experience and probabilities have shown are worthy of that confidence. But I don't belief anything on faith. Faith is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. Thus any belief which requires faith should be rejected for that reason.

So it just boils down to the fact that you don't have the faith that God exists, which brings us to this, how do you know you exist?

Solisism, always the first resort of the apologist. Do you Christians all come ouf of the same cookie cutter? Always with the same fallacies and always fail the same way.

You should see the Twilight Zone video I linked for you. It not only shows how your god is; it shows what your Heaven would be like too. It would be a nightmarish hell from which you cannot awake or escape even in death because the god itself is a monster. It does terrible unspeakable crimes and you just keep having to heap praise upon it no matter how awful it is.

The bible clearly states in Revelation that it's not going to be like that. But I know you have to go so I won't keep you. We'll have to talk again Monday. I appreciate your allowing me to talk with you.

It doesn't matter what it says in Revelations any more than what it says in the Bhagavad Gita or Aesops Fables. It's all just make believe. The Bible is absolutely wrong about absolutely everything, with not one word of truth in it but (as Mark Twain put it) "upwards of a thousand lies".

There have been so many archeological discoveries proving the bible that a blind man could see it. Oh my gosh.

No sir, not one ever. What evidence there is shows for certain that there was never any Adam and Eve nor a Moses either. We know for certain the global flood never happened nor the Tower of Babel either, and those two absurd fairy tales are actually the closest to the truth, believe it or not.

The Bible isn't just wrong scientifically and historically; it's wrong ethically and morally. It's completely wrong on all points. For instance, every single thing the Bible says about the nature of the earth and its relation to the rest of the cosmos is laughably wrong.

How do you think the cosmos came to be?

If you still believe in Noah's ark and talking snakes, then there's no way you'd understand the answer to that question. But give me a moment and I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about.

Please don't underestimate me.

You're a creationist. You believe in Adam and Eve, talking snakes and talking donkeys, and a tower to Heaven. And you say all the exact same things as everyone else on your script. As if no one in your whole religion ever learned anything. So how could you understand my answer to the origin of the cosmos if you've read the Bible and overlooked all of this?

(from my book) If the Bible is interpreted literally, then it is clear that its authors believed that the world was spread out like a map over a flat disc—not a sphere [dur], but a circle [chug] (Isaiah 40:22) divided into four quadrants (Isaiah 11:12), sometimes mistranslated as “corners.” This disc-world stood on pillars (1 Samuel 2:8) like a table so that it would not move (Psalms 93:1 and 1 Chronicles 16:30). All of this was submerged in a watery abyss and covered by a giant transparent crystal dome, like a snow globe (Genesis 1:7). The sun, moon, and stars were contained within the expanse (Genesis 1:14) of this massive dome (Ezekiel 1:22). Fountains would allow water in from below the firmament, and windows in the expanse of it would allow rain in also (Genesis 7:11). This wasn’t even an original idea; it was a common belief throughout many neighboring regions, but it was still wrong. The biblical authors obviously knew nothing about the real state of this world nor the worlds beyond this one either. But we know what lies outside our atmosphere, and that proves that there is no water above where the firmament isn’t, and no windows to let it drain in if there was either water or firmament there.

Some Persians at that time said that the god Mithras had the stars sewn into the lining of his cloak, which he would drape over the crystalline firmament to bring on the night. But we know that night is not a veil to be spread over the missing firmament like a curtain (Psalms 104:2) or a tent. We also know that the stars are not made to stand in the span of this expanse (Isaiah 48:13) because they are not “high” in the firmament (Job 22:12); there is no firmament, and they are so far beyond our puny world that “height” is meaningless and inapplicable. They are much too far away to be blown out of place by any storm (2 Esdras 15:34–35) and they couldn’t be taken down by anything at all. We’ve also proven that the illusive heavenly firmament has no foundations either (2 Samuel 22:8), and neither does the earth (Job 38:4–6). There are no pillars holding Earth above the deep (1 Samuel 2:8) because there is no deep (Genesis 1:2). Outer space is not full of water!

We also now know what lies outside our gravitational field, and that proves that you can’t have any passage of days and nights without a sun (Genesis 1:13–14) to measure them against an Earth that constantly moves (Psalm 104:5). We also know that the sun cannot be made to set at noon (Amos 8:9), and that neither the sun nor the moon can be stopped in the sky (Joshua 10:12–13).

We also now know what is beyond our solar system, which means we know the stars can’t fall from the sky (Matthew 24:29). Even if they did, we still couldn’t stomp on them (Daniel 8:10) because they’re each thousands to millions of miles around, which makes it a bit silly to imagine a whole group of them having conscious minds (Judges 5:20) and ganging up in combat with a mere human being.

We even know now what lies beyond our galaxy. And that proves that nothing or no one could ever “seal up the stars” (Job 9:7). We also know that the earth with its fictitious firmament didn’t predate the “lights in the heavens” by any amount of time (Genesis 1:17–19) and that the stars weren’t “set” specifically to light the earth, because the earth is not at the center, or the beginning (Genesis 1:1) of the universe in any respect. The way the Bible depicts Earth in relation to the rest of the universe is wrong, and has been known to be wrong for thousands of years.

I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound rude. It's late. We'll talk soon.

It's ok. I don't want to sound rude either. Have a great night.

I want to continue this conversation, but it does no good to hold it here. I would like to change your mind. But if I can't get through to you, then I could still reach others who might follow along--if this were in a public forum. The best way, I think, would be to hold it on a discussion board where anyone can follow the conversation easily, and where we can post links and illustrations as necessary. Here is my favorite place to do that. http://www.theleagueofreason.co.uk/With your permission, I could copy our entire conversation so far into a new thread, and we can resume there. It is more time-consuming, but more productive if I really want to prove all my points to your satisfaction, such that you will gladly abandon creationism and be embarrassed about it from here on. Otherwise, if you prefer, I can set aside an hour or so to talk with you live on a Google hangout. I'm a 24/7 kind of guy, so we could do that on almost any hour of any day that is convenient for you.

With all due respect, we both know where each other stand and when I gave my life to Jesus I never felt so free and happy, so you will never talk me out of Christianity like you will probably always be an atheist. But you have the right to believe what you want because we are both Americans. I just don't want to waste our time with an endless debate. I appreciate your talking with me though.

It wouldn't be a debate. My challenge is this. I can prove that biological evolution is the truest, best explanation there is for the origin of our species, and that it is the only explanation of biodiversity with either evidentiary support or scientific validity. At the same time, I will prove that there is no truth whatsoever to any religious belief and that creationism is based entirely on frauds falsehoods fibs and fakery. This is not a matter of belief or opinion. This is demonstrable fact, and I can prove that even to your satisfaction. Your refusal to engage that is disappointing but not at all surprising, as I have met many believers who did not want to know for sure what the truth really is; they'd rather make-believe something else.

You can't prove to the very beginning, it's like this, evolution boils down to believing in a big bang which you don't know where the gases came from and I believe in a creator who made everything. That's all there is to it.

But I certainly can prove the facts we know about evolution, and I can easily prove that creationism not only has no truth to it but is driven entirely by falsehoods and fallacies. Your belief system is nothing but a pack of lies, and yes I really can prove that.

So where did the gases come from?

Coincidentally I just uploaded a video today that explained that.

What is not mentioned here is the Nitrogen majority, which is attributed to vulcanism.

Are we going to do this properly? Because as I said, it doesn't do any good to put all this effort into a private message. This conversation should be available for others to see, and it would be best to do that where anyone can follow the whole discussion from a single link. Can I set this up on League of Reason? Or should we at least have a video chat?

I feel like you are going to put it on this site and then I am going to be over run by your people. And I just started my new job this morning so I have a lot going on right now.I just don't have the time.

Run over by my people? If we do it on League of Reason, I can put a restriction that it would only be the two of us participating. If we did a Google hangout, it would only be you and me talking face to face.

Oh ok. We could continue talking on League of Reason then.I didn't mean to sound rude in any way though.

Thanks much. I'll put a thread together and get back to you by tomorrow.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

I would request that this discussion be between myself and the person who was messaging me.

So now we may renew our discussion where it will be saved for posterity. We can talk about how Jesus endorsed Old Testament laws and fables despite the absurdities, atrocities, inconsistencies and contradictions in your scriptures or how immoral God is or religious beliefs are. We could also look at how trends of humanitarian values are on the rise instead getting worse and worse or we can talk about the philosophy of science and its methodology as contrasted with the auto-deceptive delusions of faith. It's all up to you.

Time is an issue for both of us, but that's OK; there's no rush.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

AronRa wrote:I would request that this discussion be between myself and the person who was messaging me.

So now we may renew our discussion where it will be saved for posterity. We can talk about how Jesus endorsed Old Testament laws and fables despite the absurdities, atrocities, inconsistencies and contradictions in your scriptures or how immoral God is or religious beliefs are. We could also look at how trends of humanitarian values are on the rise instead getting worse and worse or we can talk about the philosophy of science and its methodology as contrasted with the auto-deceptive delusions of faith. It's all up to you.

So just to be clear, in your video about where the gases came from, you didn't answer my question. Where did the gases come from, where did the energy come from, and where did the "newly formed sun" come from? And by the way are you familiar with the law of Conservation of Angular Momentum? If so you will know that if one object is spinning in one direction...

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Last edited by joelmoravek on Wed May 31, 2017 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

joelmoravek wrote:So just to be clear, in your video about where the gases came from, you didn't answer my question. Where did the gases come from, where did the energy come from, and where did the "newly formed sun" come from? And by the way are you familiar with the law of Conservation of Angular Momentum? If so you will know that if one obne

Sent from my SM-J327P using Tapatalk

Hi joelmoravek, and welcome to LoR.

I assume you are the person AronRa intended this thread for, so I am going to lock up this thread for all other regular users, so only you and AronRa can use it.

joelmoravek wrote:So just to be clear, in your video about where the gases came from, you didn't answer my question. Where did the gases come from, where did the energy come from, and where did the "newly formed sun" come from? And by the way are you familiar with the law of Conservation of Angular Momentum? If so you will know that if one object is spinning in one direction...The outside will be spinning faster than the inside.

Yes I did explain where the gases came from and where most of the energy came from too. If you really want to know where the energy came from, and how the sun was formed, I'll give you the scientific explanation for that as well.

But let's pretend for a moment that I hadn't explained that. Let's pretend that no one yet knows any of this. They do: this is a pretty basic science lesson that is well-known, but we're gonna pretend they don't for a moment. What would that mean? To me, that would mean that we haven't figured out the answer yet, and it is thus unexplained. However I suspect that you would take that as a god-of-the-gaps, (also known as Ad ignorantiam) and you would employ that logical fallacy to say, "you can't explain it. Therefore it must have been magic". But no, "unexplained" doesn't mean miracle, and saying "goddidit" doesn't explain anything.

More importantly, it doesn't address all the grotesque errors in the Bible's attempt to describe the earth in relation to the rest of the cosmos. You skipped over that without comment. But you must realize that the Bible was written from the earth-centered perspective of ignorant superstitious primitives who thought the world was flat and who had no idea what the truth is. That is the only explanation for how the Bible got everything wrong.

So let's level the playing field. The rules that apply to me should apply to you too. The first of those rules is that it is dishonest to assert as fact that which is not evidently true. You're welcome to say you believe whatever nonsense you like and you won't have to defend it, but you can't state that anything is actually true unless you can show evidence indicating that it is. So when you want me to explain where this or that came from, be ready to do the same. And if you cite the Bible, don't be surprised if I cite the Bhagavad Gita, Helenist mythology or Aesop's Fables.

Also understand that the admin of this site is an astronomer, so if you want to go there, I'll just get all the necessary citations from him. There are a number of other professional scientists on this board too. My area of expertise is evolution and particularly cladistic phylogenetics. So if you want to talk about religion or scripture, I'm fine with that, but if you want to talk science, keep it in my field, so I can give you the best answers.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain

My point with the Conservation of Angular Momentum is if there was a big bang from swirling particles, Why are there two planets and six moons that we know about that are spinning backwards? The cosmos only prove the bible, don't be blind. If you are struggling with a particular point in the bible that you think is an error, I will be glad to help you to the best of my ability.

That video did it again. All it said was there was an ancient star that exploded from swirling dust and gravity. You scientifically can't tell me where it all came from. It's circular reasoning. So it boils down to this, you believe "in the beginning dirt", and I believe "In the beginning God." God created everything, it's as simple as that. Our universe is to complex to say that it came to be by accident, it needed a designer. God created everything and here we are. It's as simple as that.

joelmoravek wrote:My point with the Conservation of Angular Momentum is if there was a big bang from swirling particles, Why are there two planets and six moons that we know about that are spinning backwards?

Because you asked me about the origin of the solar system, not the origin of the universe. The big bang did not start from swirling particles and our solar system didn't come from the big bang. The big bang happened billions of years before the nebula that gave birth to our sun. Our solar system began with the central gravity of a nebula bringing it into a spin, in which, (as I explained) several things crashed into other things. These chaotic collisions threw some things into different elipses, orbits and axis.

The cosmos only prove the bible, don't be blind. If you are struggling with a particular point in the bible that you think is an error, I will be glad to help you to the best of my ability.

The cosmos proves the Bible wrong. Because as I pointed out to you before:

If the Bible is interpreted literally, then it is clear that its authors believed that the world was spread out like a map over a flat disc—not a sphere [dur], but a circle [chug] (Isaiah 40:22) divided into four quadrants (Isaiah 11:12), sometimes mistranslated as “corners.” This disc-world stood on pillars (1 Samuel 2:8) like a table so that it would not move (Psalms 93:1 and 1 Chronicles 16:30). All of this was submerged in a watery abyss and covered by a giant transparent crystal dome, like a snow globe (Genesis 1:7). The sun, moon, and stars were contained within the expanse (Genesis 1:14) of this massive dome (Ezekiel 1:22). Fountains would allow water in from below the firmament, and windows in the expanse of it would allow rain in also (Genesis 7:11).

This wasn’t even an original idea; it was a common belief throughout many neighboring regions, but it was still wrong. The biblical authors obviously knew nothing about the real state of this world nor the worlds beyond this one either. But we know what lies outside our atmosphere, and that proves that there is no water above where the firmament isn’t, and no windows to let it drain in if there was either water or firmament there.

Some Persians at that time said that the god Mithras had the stars sewn into the lining of his cloak, which he would drape over the crystalline firmament to bring on the night. But we know that night is not a veil to be spread over the missing firmament like a curtain (Psalms 104:2) or a tent. We also know that the stars are not made to stand in the span of this expanse (Isaiah 48:13) because they are not “high” in the firmament (Job 22:12); there is no firmament, and they are so far beyond our puny world that “height” is meaningless and inapplicable. They are much too far away to be blown out of place by any storm (2 Esdras 15:34–35) and they couldn’t be taken down by anything at all. We’ve also proven that the illusive heavenly firmament has no foundations either (2 Samuel 22:8), and neither does the earth (Job 38:4–6). There are no pillars holding Earth above the deep (1 Samuel 2:8) because there is no deep (Genesis 1:2). Outer space is not full of water!

We also now know what lies outside our gravitational field, and that proves that you can’t have any passage of days and nights without a sun (Genesis 1:13–14) to measure them against an Earth that constantly moves (Psalm 104:5). We also know that the sun cannot be made to set at noon (Amos 8:9), and that neither the sun nor the moon can be stopped in the sky (Joshua 10:12–13).

We also now know what is beyond our solar system, which means we know the stars can’t fall from the sky (Matthew 24:29). Even if they did, we still couldn’t stomp on them (Daniel 8:10) because they’re each thousands to millions of miles around, which makes it a bit silly to imagine a whole group of them having conscious minds (Judges 5:20) and ganging up in combat with a mere human being.

We even know now what lies beyond our galaxy. And that proves that nothing or no one could ever “seal up the stars” (Job 9:7). We also know that the earth with its fictitious firmament didn’t predate the “lights in the heavens” by any amount of time (Genesis 1:17–19) and that the stars weren’t “set” specifically to light the earth, because the earth is not at the center, or the beginning (Genesis 1:1) of the universe in any respect. The way the Bible depicts Earth in relation to the rest of the universe is wrong, and has been known to be wrong for thousands of years.

That video did it again. All it said was there was an ancient star that exploded from swirling dust and gravity. You scientifically can't tell me where it all came from. It's circular reasoning.

So when you asked me where the sun came from, you weren't really asking where the sun came from; you're asking where EVERYTHING came from. Because you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. I'm betting you don't even know what the cosmos really is. You certainly don't know how big it is.

So it boils down to this, you believe "in the beginning dirt", and I believe "In the beginning God." God created everything, it's as simple as that. Our universe is to complex to say that it came to be by accident, it needed a designer. God created everything and here we are. It's as simple as that.

I do not believe "in the beginning dirt" either. Dirt wasn't there in the beginning. What is evidently true is WAY more complex than what you think it is.

Don't you ever get tired of being wrong about everything all the time?

So it comes down to this. You believe in magic. I don't believe anything the way you do. Your beliefs are an act of will, the power of pretend. What I believe is whatever I think is true but don't know to be true. It is not a matter of choice, but a logical consequence of my understanding of the facts. My beliefs are tentative, dependent on evidence instead of faith, and my perspective will obligately change as my understanding improves in light of new information. Faith however means to make-believe, to convince yourself of impossible nonsense for no good reason, and then refuse to be reasoned with.

Now if you want to talk about evolution, then we can get away from what I believe so I can show you what I know, so that you'll know it too, and you won't be a creationist anymore.

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true." - Friedrich Nietzsche. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." - Mark Twain